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PST

PST FILES PRESENT A HIGH SECURITY RISK

PST files are highly portable; they can be disconnected from Outlook and copied or moved to another Outlook client very easily.

They can be password protected, although a simple search on the internet will find any number of programs that can crack these passwords. This puts end user data and intellectual property data at high risk.

They can be seen as a great way of moving email data between people and/or organizations quickly.

PST FILES ARE UNRELIABLE AND PLACE PRESSURE ON IT SUPPORT

PSTs were never designed to hold large amounts of email data yet users dump emails into them unaware of the data risk these notoriously unreliable files present as they often corrupt.

Power outages, PC crashes or inadvertently ‘closing’ the PST disconnects it from the Outlook profile. It’s then usually overlooked or lost, creating an uncoupled or ‘orphaned’ PST which is invisible to IT but can still contain valuable information that needs to be preserved or discovered.

These files take up nearly 15% of an IT department's daily helpdesk calls.

PST FILES COMPROMISE EDISCOVERY REQUESTS

When an organization is subject to a legal hold request and needs to identify information including emails that are relevant to a particular issue, any emails that are contained in PST files won’t be identified because their contents are available only to their end-user.

Since most legal discovery occurs sometime after the alleged incident, not knowing the location or the owner of PST files can make Legal Hold, eDiscovery requests incredibly challenging.

PST FILES FALL OUTSIDE OF COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS

The PST itself is merely a container file and does not fall under compliance requirements but the emails and attachments that are hidden within it DO. If the IT department is not managing PST files, best practice is jeopardized.

PST files often contain emails which should have been managed but, owing to restrictions on access they are not subject to the usual retention, deletion or classification policies.

PST FILES ARE INCREDIBLY ELUSIVE

PST files can be located almost anywhere – desktops, laptops, corporate servers, removable media, even home PCs. Over 65% of users store PST files on laptops and 20% of users store them on portable storage devices.

Outlook must have access to the location where the PST is stored, fine for office-based users who have the same access to local or network storage, but if users work from different desktops or locations they may not be able to gain access to the PSTs.

Also, if the Outlook Web App (OWA) is utilized, users will have no access to the files.

PST FILES CREATE STORAGE, BACKUP AND RETENTION PROBLEMS

If PSTs located on desktops or laptops fall outside the corporate backup strategy, they’re neither backed up nor protected. If located on network shares, they’re probably being backed up, but this also brings challenges.

Each time Outlook connects to a PST, it’s marked as requiring backup (even if nothing has changed). It will then back up the entire PST container file.

The average PST file is 1.3gb (around 100,000+ emails). Multiply that by the number of users using or storing PSTs and you’ll understand the massive impact on backup windows and restore times

PST FILES CAN DERAIL STRATEGIC IT PROJECTS

If you’re looking to migrate to Microsoft online platforms, PSTs should be considered as part of the project.

Consolidating all email data into the online Exchange environment not only enhances user experience and productivity, it ensures that any legacy data is protected.

Similarly, a refresh to either new hardware or a virtual environment can be impacted by PST files which can be located anywhere in the desktop environment. A large amount of data is put at risk if they are not discovered and handled correctly.

Microsoft's PST Capture Version 2.0 – launched earlier this year, was a clear sign that Microsoft acknowledges the challenges presented by PST files particularly for critical IT projects such as Office 365 migration, BYOD, eDiscovery and Compliance.

Version 2.0 addressed some of the initial product’s shortcomings but many issues remain.

PST Capture V2.0 Issues

Not scalable

Slow import into Office 365

No upgrade to V2.0 (requires reinstall)

Client Software Install

No scanning of shares

Assigning PST Ownership

Locked PST Files

Disconnecting / Deleting PSTs

PST Capture V2.0, although improved is not designed to handle enterprise-wide or large scale PST projects. It’s a free tool for a reason – it’s simply not competitive with other purpose-built PST migration tools.

Feature Comparison

Enterprise-class customers who have evaluated Microsoft’s PST Capture Tool and found it lacking have had great success with C2C’s PST Enterprise solution. This document allows you to compare the features of PST Enterprise against Microsoft's PST Capture.

Unlike PST Capture, PST Enterprise is purpose-built to handle large-scale migrations, and provides the level of functionality necessary for organizations who are trying to migrate hundreds or thousands of PSTs.

Microsoft recently launched a new version of their for-free PST Capture Tool, and has addressed some of the initial product’s shortcomings, not the least of which was a fixed 1000-user limit. This latest release continues to reinforce that Microsoft acknowledges what email administrators have known for years – that PST files are evil.

In the latest version of this tool – whose genesis was the former RedGate tool which Microsoft acquired some years back – many of the initial issues are addressed and a couple of new features added :

Support for Exchange 2013 – keeping the tool up to date with Exchange versions.

However, users complain that V2.0 is still extremely slow when importing into Office 365 – a primary use for Microsoft’s PST Capture.
Unfortunately it’s not possible to upgrade the tool from V1.0 to V2.0 – it requires an uninstall of V1 and then a new install of V2, and most of the other problems from the initial V1.0 tool remain:

Client Software Install – software must be installed on each client, and this is not an automatic process. For large organizations, this simply doesn’t scale.

No scanning of shares – it is not possible to scan network shares unless the file server is running Windows (so common devices such as NAS boxes, NetApp Filers etc cannot be scanned).

PST Ownership – there are two issues here. The first is that many PSTs show-up in the results with BUILTINAdminstrators as the owner, meaning a valid owner must be manually selected from the Global Address List. The second is that for orphaned PST files – i.e., those for whom there is no readily-identifiable owner – PST Capture does not attempt to identify the owner. Not only is this process highly manual, it’s a time and labour intensive challenge.

Locked PST Files – most users have PST files open in their Outlook profile. PST Capture cannot process those because Outlook has a lock on them, putting an artificial constraint on PST migration (i.e., requiring that users close-down Outlook).

Disconnecting / Deleting PSTs – PST Capture only imports PSTs – they remain in the original user’s profile. Deletion is a separate, manual process, and if these files are not deleted, users may end up with PST content showing up in several places. Furthermore, for large import projects, having to manually disconnect and remove thousands of users’ PSTs simply isn’t feasible.

This doesn’t mean PST Capture V2.0 isn’t a good tool – it is, and greatly improved – it just isn’t designed to handle enterprise-wide or large scale PST projects. Microsoft gives the tool away for a reason, simply that it’s not competitive with other purpose-built PST migration tools.

Enterprise-class customers who have evaluated Microsoft’s PST Capture Tool and found it lacking have had great success with C2C’s PST Enterprise solution. Unlike PST Capture, PST Enterprise is purpose-built to handle large-scale migrations, and provides the level of functionality necessary for organizations who are trying to migrate hundreds or thousands of PSTs. Some of the key features include:

No client software install necessary – it runs from the network, in memory on the workstation with a very small footprint

Microsoft have announced their ‘PST Capture Tool’ in the past few days, which is a great step forward. They finally understand and acknowledge what email administrators have known for years – that PST files are evil.

It seems that this tool is/was the old RedGate tool which has been sold to Microsoft, revamped a little, had some testing and has been made available as a free download. Redgate were not in the messaging space very long, quickly withdrawing their archiving tool a few months after its release and now getting rid of their PST tool.

We have been dealing with PST importing and management projects for many years, so I was keen to see how far Microsoft had gone to help customer get a grip on PSTs.

Unfortunately it is one of those cases where ‘you get what you pay for’.

I’m sure a lot of this will come out in blogs and messaging articles over the coming days, but even a cursory look unveils a number of significant limitations. Here’s the top 5 in my opinion:

Client Software Install – although it is only a shade over half a megabyte, it installs Windows services and needs a few bits of custom configurations (host server name and port). This approach doesn’t scale at all well. Maybe for 50 users, you might be able to visit all their desktops and get it installed, but not for a few hundred, never mind 50,000 users.

PST Ownership – the data reported back on each PST file found is sparse at best, but it does include the (NTFS) ‘file owner’. The only ‘semi automated’ way of assigning ownership of a PST (and therefore which mailbox it gets ingested into) is to ‘use the file owner’. Unfortunately most PSTs are showing up with ‘BUILTINAdministrators’ as the owner, so it’s a case of manual assignment (selecting from the Global Address List) – again not feasible for more than a few tens of PSTs, never mind hundreds of thousands of PSTs

Locked PST Files – most users have PST files open in their Outlook profile. It seems that the PST Capture Tool cannot process those because Outlook has a lock on them. Realistically this means the migration can only happen when users do not have Outlook open.

Disconnecting / Deleting PSTs – this is going to be a really confusing one for the end users, when a migration is completed, the original PST is not removed from the Outlook profile or deleted, so users end up with all their PST content in their mailbox as well as the PSTs file still connected in Outlook. It would have been better to automatically remove these (at least from the profile, if not from disk also) when the file has been migrated.

‘Other’ PST Types – this is one that we came across a few years back – if a user adds a ‘SharePoint List’ or an ‘Internet Calendar’ to their Outlook profile then those are stored, under the covers, as PSTs. It seems this tool also imports the data from those. Migrate that data and it gets regenerated in the PST again and presumably imported again, later when it should not have been pulled in, in the first instance.

In summary, it is a good tool, if you are looking to go through a small scale migration of data, a handful of users, or a few tens of PSTs. Anything larger, in the hundreds, thousands or, as in one project we are running, millions of PSTs will require more control and a better thought through solution.

The key aspect of these larger projects is network bandwidth, in fact I believe this is where these projects will either succeed or fail. Customers are not taking the prospect of moving 600+TB of data over their networks lightly.

I believe there are some key limitations in the way the PST Capture Tool moves the data, but I’ll cover that in a future article. In the meantime, if you are having problems with PSTs and have found that the PST Capture Tool doesn’t meet your needs then have a look at our PST Enterprise solution, it’s the summation of years of experience, challenging, large scale environments and ironing out all those gotchas listed above (as well as many more)